The condescending elitist cop out. — Janus

vs truculent atheism ;-)

I didn't say 'we'

make a leap of faith to some spiritual position or other. — Banno

Or, a philosophical perspective that you can't fathom.

Anyway, carry on.

Regarding Armstrong suggesting that humans are objects. In his ontology, they are. That doesn't mean they're JUST objects — Relativist

But it does. That is exactly what it means. His profession of respect for religion is out of civility. But, he says, understand that it is subjective, comforting for those who believe it, but not true.

What you consider the "pretense of objectivity" is, to me, just applying a consistent perspective from which to evaluate the world. — Relativist

A perspective which includes a number of presuppositions, mainly drawn from science (despite your denials) or at least from natural philosophy. Hence why I say 'metaphysical naturalism' is self-contradictory - naturalism has generally defined itself in opposition to metaphysics.

Just because our methods emerge from our understandings doesn't mean we aren't reducible, but this shouldn't be a threatening proposition - because it doesn't erase our values or the feelings we have. — Relativist

The underlying belief is that mind is the product of physical causes - and Armstrong says it! - which I'm saying forgets or fails to realise that mind is the pre-condition of an analysis of causes. That is why Schopenhauer says 'materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets himself.' (Why to I keep quoting Schopenhauer? Because he was an articulate advocate of philosophical idealism. There are aspects of his philosophy I don't agree with, but he puts this point with clarity and force.)

I'm talking specifically about your Kantian space and time stuff — Apustimelogist

It is not my invention. You can find the source text here. Suffice to say, Kant is very difficult to read, and I claim no mastery of his books. But just take the first paragraph in that section:

1. Time is not an empirical conception. For neither coexistence nor succession would be perceived by us, if the representation of time did not exist as a foundation à priori. Without this presupposition we could not represent to ourselves that things exist together at one and the same time, or at different times, that is, contemporaneously, or in succession.

The other passage that was introduced earlier in this thread was from the Aeon Magazine article on the Einstein-Bergson debate on time, specifically:

To examine the measurements involved in clock time, Bergson considers an oscillating pendulum, moving back and forth. At each moment, the pendulum occupies a different position in space, like the points on a line or the moving hands on a clockface. In the case of a clock, the current state – the current time – is what we call ‘now’. Each successive ‘now’ of the clock contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct. But this is not how we experience time. Instead, we hold these separate moments together in our memory. We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession. Clocks don’t measure time; we do. This is why Bergson believed that clock time presupposes lived time.

Bergson appreciated that we need the exactitude of clock time for natural science. For example, to measure the path that an object in motion follows in space over a specific time interval, we need to be able measure time precisely. What he objected to was the surreptitious substitution of clock time for duration in our metaphysics of time. His crucial point in Time and Free Will was that measurement presupposes duration, but duration ultimately eludes measurement.

The tendency of his thinking is shown in the "pure". — Janus

Why does Kant say that space and time are 'pure intuitions'?

2. Time is a necessary representation, lying at the foundation of all our intuitions. With regard to phenomena in general, we cannot think away time from them, and represent them to ourselves as out of and unconnected with time, but we can quite well represent to ourselves time void of phenomena. Time is therefore given à priori. In it alone is all reality of phenomena possible. These may all be annihilated in thought, but time itself, as the universal condition of their possibility, cannot be so annulled. ...

4. Time is not a discursive, or as it is called, general conception, but a pure form of the sensuous intuition

By calling them pure forms of intuition, Kant is emphasizing that space and time are structural features of human sensibility, not features of reality as it is in itself. They are not merely psychological or subjective in the personal sense, but transcendentally subjective—conditions without which we would have no coherent experience at all. ( You could credibly use the term 'transpersonal' in place of 'transcendental' in this context i.e. 'true for all subjects'.)

Bottom line in all of this is there is no time without mind. If you sputter and gesticulate and point to the 'vast aeons of time that existed before sentient beings came along', there is still mind there.

It's yours.

//and that, for now, is that.//

Can you see any connection between philosophy of science and what I’m attempting to argue for? Because I’m not talking about science.

I don't understand what you actually mean by it or what implication has for anything at all in any possible way. — Apustimelogist

Have you ever studied any philosophy of science—Kuhn, Polanyi, Feyerabend, that sort of thing?

So...your view is that space and time are entirely mind-dependent. — Relativist

I wouldn’t say that space and time are “entirely mind-dependent” in the sense of being subjective or personal. I’m not saying they’re imaginary or arbitrary, nor that they vary from person to person. What I’m proposing is in line with the Kantian (and later phenomenological) insight that space and time are conditions of appearance—they are the framework within which any object can appear to us at all, not features of things as they exist independently of experience. That is the sense in which they're not mind-independent.

Why? Because we never encounter any object that is not extended in space and persisting or changing through time. But we never experience space or time themselves apart from the objects and events that are given in them. Time and space are preconditions of experience, but not themselves objects of experience.

A degree of skepticism is appropriate because all scientific "knowledge" (body of accepted facts) is tentative. Feel free to add an element of skepticism on the basis that our foundational starting point (our perceptions and cognitive faculties) is a step removed, but then I ask: what's the value of doing this, other than as an intellectual nod to possibility? Why treat it as tentative, like we do scientific knowledge, when there is zero chance of correcting it? — Relativist

Here, I’d say the value isn’t in treating our foundational perceptual and cognitive framework as "tentative" in the same way we treat scientific hypotheses—after all, as you say, we can't "revise" the basic conditions of human cognition. But acknowledging their conditional or constructed nature serves a different philosophical purpose: it helps us see the limits of objectivity, and opens space for deeper inquiry into the nature of reality and experience.

Kant’s insight—and I think Schopenhauer, Husserl, and even parts of quantum theory echo this—is that the very things we take for granted (space, time, causality, objecthood) are not absolute givens, but conditions for appearance. We can’t “correct” them from the outside, but we can come to understand how they frame everything we think and perceive, and that’s not trivial.

Why bother? Because once you see that the world we experience is not the world-in-itself, but the world as it appears under certain cognitive conditions, you begin to notice how easily we mistake models for reality, conceptual constructs for independent facts, and contingent frameworks for absolutes. That has enormous implications—not only for metaphysics, but for ethics, consciousness, and our place in the cosmos.

In short, it’s not about revising cognition—it’s about cultivating the humility to see that reality might be deeper than what any model or theory can capture. That’s not idle skepticism—it’s philosophical maturity.

What I’m ultimately taking issue with is the pretense of objectivity in philosophy, especially where it has been co-opted by scientific materialism or physicalism. This worldview treats the human being as simply another object among objects, to be analyzed in the same terms as stars, stones, or synapses:

What does modern science have to say about the nature of man? There are, of course, all sorts of disagreements and divergencies in the views of individual scientists. But I think it is true to say that one view is steadily gaining ground, so that it bids fair to become established scientific doctrine. This is the view that we can give a complete account of man in purely physico-chemical terms. — D M Armstrong, The Nature of Mind

That is, as an object.


But philosophy cannot honestly sustain this stance. The human subject is not just an object within the world, but also the condition for any world appearing. Scientific objectivity depends on observation, and observation presupposes a subject—a standpoint, a perspective, a consciousness. To then treat that subject as if it were just another measurable object is to erase the very ground from which all measurement arises.

This is not a rejection of science, but a rejection of a metaphysics that forgets its own conditions. It’s requirement to recover the truth that human beings are not reducible to what objective methods can say about them, because those methods themselves emerge from the activity of human understanding.

And physicalism, to put it in the Australian vernacular, has that entirely arse-about :-)

both of which reinforce my point that time has an ineluctably subjective element. That doesn't mean that it is subjective or only in the mind but that it cannot be understood as objective in any absolute sense.

On its way to the eye, the photon passes through every point between the object and the eye, of which there are an infinite number. As the photon can only be in one place at one time (ignoring complexities of quantum mechanics), at each point the photon passes through, it exists in the present time, it exists in the "now". Either there are an infinite number of "nows" between the object and the eye or there is only one "now", where the photon happens to be at any moment in time. — RussellA

That picture of the photon passing through every point on a classical trajectory assumes a deterministic path and a continuous sequence of objective instants. But Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment casts serious doubt on whether such a path can be meaningfully assigned at all. In quantum mechanics, the photon doesn’t have a definite position at each moment unless measured.

In fact, what counts as the history of the photon (did it take one path? both? neither?) can depend on a measurement made after the photon has already passed the apparatus. This suggests that there is no determinate series of spatial locations or temporal “nows” that the photon occupies independently of the measurement context.

So no—we can’t “ignore quantum mechanics” here, because it challenges the very assumptions that underlie the idea of a photon existing at some location at each moment in time. Meaning the example of a photon does not serve the argument (ref).

It's also worth remembering that special relativity already showed us that time is not absolute. The rate at which time passes depends on the observer's frame of reference—what counts as “now” for one observer is not “now” for another moving at a different velocity. There is no single universal present in relativity. (Hence the name ;-) )

So I think I’m actually agreeing with the post I responded to, but I didn’t read it very carefully.

Well, if it’s true that the strong force was a small percent different, then matter would not form, the fact that it’s a logical possibility that it might be a small percentage different is meaningless, isn’t it?

How do possible worlds intersect with the anthropic cosmological principle? As is well known this principle states that had a very small number of constants and ratios on the atomic scale been ever so slightly different, matter and living organisms could not exist.

The fact that it is logically possible that those ratios and standards might be different only goes to show the emptiness of pure logic.

A book on the subject of this thread: Heidegger, Neoplatonism, and the History of Being: Relation as Ontological Ground, James Filler

This book argues that Western philosophy's traditional understanding of Being as substance is incorrect, and demonstrates that Being is fundamentally Relationality. To make that argument, the book examines the history of Western philosophy's evolving conception of being, and shows how this tradition has been dominated by an Aristotelian understanding of substance and his corresponding understanding of relation. First, the book establishes that the original concept of Being in ancient Western philosophy was relational, and traces this relational understanding of Being through the Neoplatonists. Then, it follows the substantial understanding of Being through Aristotle and the Scholastics to reach its crisis in Descartes. Finally, the book demonstrates that Heidegger represents a recovery of the original, relational understanding of Being.

YouTube dialog on the book between the author and John Vervaeke

Anyway, as you know, most Buddhist schools regard the 'self' as illusion-like/mere appearance. Of course, there are various strands of Buddhist thought. I believe that Madhyamaka and Yogacara come close to transcendental idealism. But, in both case, both the 'self' and the 'world' (and thus every thing) are illusion-like, mere apperances. When all conceptual constructs are removed, 'what remains' is neither 'something' nor 'nothing' (because, after all, apperances cannot be negated). — boundless

the Dharmakaya is nevertheless real - but never to be made the subject of dogmatic belief. But that is definitely another thread (or forum!)

It (Schopenhauer's analysis) seems to conflate the object (the existent that we naturally believe we are perceiving) with the perception of the object. It's perfectly fine to draw attention to the perception process, but I object to blurring the distinction. It's unclear what is meant by coming "under the forms of space, time and causality". Is this just a reference to our cognitive interpretation? Is there some reason to think space, time, causality, and spatial extension are all imaginary? — Relativist

Space and time are not imaginary, but nor are they properties of things in themselves. They are forms of intuition—that is, they belong to the structure of experience, not to things independently of experience. They're part of the conditions under which anything at all can appear to us as an object. In that sense, they are functions of cognition—not invented by the mind, but intrinsic to how the mind makes sense of what it receives.

Your objection seems to come from a position that assumes we can somehow stand outside both perception and object, as if we could compare “the thing as it is” with “the thing as it appears.” But that’s precisely what Schopenhauer—and before him, Kant—insists we cannot do. We never encounter the object “in itself”; we only ever encounter appearances—ideas, in Schopenhauer’s terms—which are already presented in accordance with the structures of mind: space, time, and causality.

Take any object you perceive—your keyboard, for instance. Its mass, extension, color, and hardness are all sensory qualities that correspond to your perceptual categories of sight, touch, etc. Its function as a tool corresponds to a conceptual framework you've learned and internalized. All of that—sensation plus interpretation—is what Schopenhauer means by “idea.”

The object as such is not separate from the idea; it is the idea, for us. This is not a denial of reality, but a statement about how reality appears, and through what structure it becomes meaningful to us at all. To ask what the object is “apart from” all that is to ask what the object is apart from any consciousness of it —an intelligible question perhaps, but one with no experiential content.

This insight—that every object is already shaped by the structures of perception and understanding—later became a stepping-off point for phenomenology which built on this by exploring how the world is always "given to" consciousness, and how even our sense of objectivity is conditioned by the intentional structures of experience.

And that continues into phenomenologically-informed cognitive science today—especially in enactivism and embodied cognition. These approaches recognize that perception isn’t a passive mirror of a ready-made world, but an active synthesis of sensorimotor patterns, embodied engagement, and context-sensitive understanding. The world, as experienced, is always co-shaped by the organism's mode of being.

So this is not just a metaphysical musing—it’s part of a serious and ongoing philosophical effort to understand how experience, meaning, and cognition are bound up with the structure of appearance itself.

Sorry to come back to this mind-warping concept, spinning off from Plato's spooky Forms. But how does the notion of "degrees of reality" differ from the "stipulated models" & "possible worlds" in Banno's post*1 to tim wood? — Gnomon

Because it is—or was—embodied in a living philosophy, not merely in the textbooks of scholars. And indeed, the origin of those schools of thought does trace back to the Platonist tradition (in the broad sense), but philosophy as a way of life, not just an academic pursuit.

The idea of hierarchy here is that reality unfolds in levels. A classic example is found in Aristotle’s De Anima, where he outlines a graded hierarchy of soul (or being), corresponding to different kinds of living things. Aristotle was not a religious mystic, and many aspects of his biology are acknowledged today as precursors to modern biology—though of course far less developed.

In De Anima, the soul (psyche) is the form or actuality of a living body, and Aristotle identifies three primary levels:

• Nutritive Soul – possessed by plants; responsible for growth, nutrition, and reproduction.
• Sensitive Soul – found in animals; includes nutritive functions, plus sensation and movement.
• Rational Soul – unique to humans; includes all prior functions and adds reason and abstract thought (nous).

Each level includes but transcends the previous—forming a natural hierarchy where higher beings realise a greater degree of actuality and potentiality.

These ideas were later woven into the Scala Naturae, or Great Chain of Being—a comprehensive metaphysical synthesis that arranged all beings in a continuous vertical order: from inanimate matter, to plants, animals, humans, celestial intelligences, and ultimately to God. Each level reflected a greater degree of perfection, actuality, and participation in divine being.

(Modern materialism inverts this ontology, treating matter as fundamental and everything else—mind, purpose, value—as emergent or illusory.)

Yet this kind of hierarchical ontology was characteristic of nearly all premodern cultures, as depicted in this schematic image:



The Great Chain of Being reached its apogee in medieval thought and has largely dropped out of secular culture. But the key difference between this and modern modal metaphysics lies in the participatory aspect: in the traditional understanding, the philosophical adept could ascend through these levels of being—gaining deeper insights into higher realities. Knowing was linked to being, and the journey was transformative (hence again the title of the Eric Perl book “Thinking Being”).

A trace of this idea still lingers today, though flattened. We still say that highly trained individuals in academic or scientific disciplines have insights into domains imperceptible to others. But now, these are typically technical or mathematical realities within a naturalist framework—stripped of the vertical, moral, and ontological significance once attached to ‘higher’ levels.

Am I missing something important in-between those philosophical categories? :smile: — Gnomon

I think you’re making an honest attempt.

Plato certainly would not entertain the later, Christian dogma of ‘ideas in the mind of God’, but due to the assimilation of Greek philosophy with biblical revelation, this became foundational to the Christian worldview for centuries. It was displaced in the late medieval and early modern periods. Modern ontology tends to be ‘flat’ - there is only one real existent, that being matter (or matter-energy-space-time). Consciousness is a result or product of undirected physical causes. ‘

But heirarchical ontology is making a comeback. Deacon refers to Aristotelian ideas in Incomplete Nature.

You are correct that no measurement exists outside of conscious temporary awareness. However, Bergson did not completely reject objective time. He differentiated between 'measured time' and 'lived time,' arguing that time cannot be fully captured by concepts or categories alone. Instead, there is likely a complex interplay between these two forms of time. — Number2018

Surely. But to say that time has a subjective element, does not therefore say that it is simply subjective. All subjects can measure time according to an objective measurement, but it regardless will always involve a subject. It’s a mistake to think of it as wholly subjective or wholly objective; it is what could be called co-arising.

There’s this kind of Darth Vader force field effect from the political right. You see it with Trump. Maybe the false illusion of certainty in a world where nothing is.

My younger sister’s example is instructive. She’s married to a public prosecutor, lovely chap, but straight out of a Somerset Maugham novel. Very old-fashioned in his view, a staunch conservative (for which reason we never discuss politics.) But the instructive thing is the depth with which he (and my sister, by way of osmosis) hated Malcolm Turnbull. Far more than anyone on the actual Left, so far as I could tell. And I think Turnbull was the last actual Liberal (as distinct from Conservative) to lead the Liberal Party.

Me, I liked him OK, although I thought he tended towards being vain, in a Warren Beatty kind of way. But I always completely supported his attempts to re-introduce some kind of sane climate policy, and was really annoyed, verging on outraged, when he was rolled over that attempt. And now, I think, the Lib-Nat coalition are reaping the bitter fruits of those decisions. And the Nat side still hasn’t learned anything from it.

Metaphysical naturalism (MN) provides a metaphysical context for what we know about the world. Of course, any metaphysical theory should be consistent with what we know, but the strength of naturalism is that it depends the fewest assumptions. The basic assumptions of MN are not derived scientifically (as scientism would require)- they are a product of conceptual analysis - just like any other metaphysical system must do. — Relativist

However, if you drill down, the basis of the 'conceptual analysis' turns out to be scientific. If you discarded scientific cosmology, atomic physics, evolutionary theory, and so on, what would be left of 'metaphysical naturalism'? And, for that matter, isn't 'metaphysical naturalism' oxymoronic insofar as naturalism is generally defined in opposition to metaphysics?

Qualia are a problem, but can be rationalized as illusions. — Relativist

What is at issue inthis rather glib statement? What's hiding behind these words?

'Qualia' is an item of academic jargon intended to denote 'the qualitative aspects of experience' - the 'what it is like'-ness of seeing, smelling, touching, experiencing - of being, in short. So in what sense are qualia 'a problem'? They're a problem for physicalism, because physicalism claims that what is real must be objectively measurable, which these qualitative states are not. Physicalism recognises only atomic, molecular, and chemical reactions that can analysed in quantitative terms within the framework of mathematicized science. 'Qualia', the qualities of existence, are 'a problem' only insofar as they can't be accomodated within that framework. So they need to be 'rationalised as illusions'. Meaning that the qualities of experience, how it feels to be human, need to be rationalised away. But an illusion can only be an artefact of consciousness. One may have delusions about consciousness, but it's not possible that consciousness itself is an illusion.

You haven't provided an overall metaphysical framework. — Relativist

To do so would require probably another long post, but essentially, I try to combine elements of traditional metaphysics (Christian and Indian) with phenomenology whilst also keeping within the outlines of evolutionary science and cosmology. I see the evolution of life in terms of the manifestation of intelligence, through which the Universe becomes aware of itself. So life and human life in particular, are not the products of chance, but neither necessarily the products of an external 'intelligent designer'. 'What is latent', as one lecturer put it to me, 'becoming patent'.

In Buddhist philosophy, the source of suffering is attachment (or clinging) to what is transient and ephemeral revolving around ego-centred consciousness. The aim of philosophy is release from those attachments, known in Eastern philosophy as liberation or mokṣa, whereas the absence of insight into that is to be ignorant of the causal chain that drives existence. Much more could be said, but that's the general drift of the metaphysical framework as I understand it.

Plus you have Rinehart stomping around saying that they're not far enough to the Right. And that dreadful Madame Lash on Sky News (Abbott's former dominatrix). So, yes, there are nefarious forces.

you're welcome. Recommend the book if you can get hold of a copy.

I don't agree that they will maintain the hard right that Spud inflicted on them. Ley says they have no choice but to move to the centre, and I think they will have to do that, otherwise the Teals will continue to eat their breakfast. (And, by the way, the Teal Nicolette Boele seems to have beaten the Liberal Gisele Kapterian in Bradfield, albet by a vanishingly small margin probably requiring a re-count. Incidentally there was a very minor social media scandal when 'Boele was forced to apologise for telling a 19-year-old salon employee that her hair washing was “amazing, and I didn’t even have sex with you”. Careers have died on less. )

I think, neither. The liberal-conservative parties can only be a realistic electoral prospect in coalition. If the separation is permanent I can’t see how they can ever be a real force again. I think Howard thinks the same, and most of the old guard as well.

Some analysis the other day, SMH or ABC, said that the collapse of the Liberal vote ultimately goes back to the climate war decisions made by Minchin and Abbott. There was a photo of the infamous group hug when they overturned the carbon tax, which was actually working exactly as intended. Then there was the disgraceful knifing of Turnbull by the climate deniers and the takeover by the Spud. That is what allowed the Teals (environmentally-aware conservatives) to scoop up the conservative vote.

By the way, as an afterthought - is the ALP roughly equivalent to Canada’s Liberal Party?

Space and time are pure forms of intuition that enable the possibility of our being able to have experiences. But what kind of experiences is he referring to? — RussellA

Any!

Critics of nominalism like Dugin and Benoist do often connect it to the unraveling of traditional identities, but as you point out, that assumes the legitimacy of those categories in the first place. From a nominalist view, those identities are constructed and contingent, not essential truths. — Areeb Salim

Are there any? Or is truth always a mental construct?

There’s an element of faith, but there are also signs and milestones. But I’m fully expecting you to declare ‘but we can never know that’, as you generally always do.

@tim wood mentions the book The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Allen Gillespie, which I read just as I started posting on forums, around 2010. It is a very insightful book. The subject really is the geneology of modernity - where 'geneology' means the development over time of the deep assumptions and understandings that underlie modern thought and philosophy.

'Gillespie turns the conventional reading of the Enlightenment (as reason overcoming religion) on its head by explaining how the humanism of Petrarch, the free-will debate between Luther and Erasmus, the scientific forays of Francis Bacon, the epistemological debate between Descarte and Hobbes, were all motivated by an underlying wrestling with the questions posed by nominalism, which, according to Gillespie, dismantled the rational God and Cosmos of medieval scholasticism and introduced (by way of the Franciscans) a fideistic God-of-pure-will, born out of a concern that anything less than this would jeopardize His divine omnipotence. Subsequent intellectual history is, in Gillespie's reading, a grappling with the question of free will and determinism. Protestantism becomes fideistic ('salvation by faith alone'), and denies free will in order to preserve God's absolute power (illustrated by Calvin's doctrine of predestination). However, this in turn culminated in an ambivalence about salvation: if God simply wills whom to save, human action can have no real merit. Gillespie's chapter on the debate between Erasmus-Luther was among the most interesting in bringing this out' ~ from a review.

… the apparent rejection or disappearance of religion and theology in fact conceals the continuing relevance of theological issues and commitments for the modern age. Viewed from this perspective, the process of secularization or disenchantment that has come to be seen as identical with modernity was in fact something different than it seemed: not the crushing victory of reason over infamy, to use Voltaire’s famous term, not the long drawn out death of God that Nietzsche proclaimed, and not the evermore distant withdrawal of the deus absconditus Heidegger points to, but the gradual transference of divine attributes to human beings (an infinite human will), the natural world (universal mechanical causality), social forces (the general will, the hidden hand), and history (the idea of progress, dialectical development, the cunning of reason). ...

That the de-emphasis, disappearance, and death of God should bring about a change in our understanding of man and nature is hardly surprising. Modernity … originates out of a series of attempts to construct a coherent metaphysic specialis on a nominalist foundation, to reconstitute something like the comprehensive summalogical account of scholastic realism. The successful completion of this project was rendered problematic by the real ontological differences between an infinite (and radically omnipotent) God and his finite creation (including both man and nature).

---

Nominalism and all its ways are devices of the Devil if devil there be. And in particular it is the disease which almost drove poor John Mill mad,—the dreary outlook upon a world in which all that can be loved, or admired, or understood is figment.

— Charles Sanders Peirce, "Semiotic and significs : the correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Lady Victoria Welby"

Compare with:

Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence. — Ideas have Consequences, Richard Weaver

(That book, by the way, is on a similar theme to Gillespie's. Weaver was a professor of English at Chicago, and published his book in the 1950s, since when it has become a staple of American intellectual conservatism (which is unfortunate in my view.))

My interpretation of this issue, and why it is important, is that this is how scientific materialism comes to be such a dominant force in modern western culture. Why? Because in the absence of universals, the nature of being can only be understood in terms of particulars, and universal concepts reduced to the psychological or social.

Oddly enough Berkeley is considered a nominalist. — NOS4A2

As indeed he was, and it is one of the major shortcomings of his otherwise ingenious philosophy. His circumlocutions on 'general ideas' are the weakest point of his writing - something which C S Peirce also commented on.

It just seems that we can, say, speak of 'boundless that is writing' but, in fact, there is no 'boundless' and the whole thing is illusion-like. If one wants, instead, to assign some reality to us and the world it seems to me that one must assume that the 'external world' has some intelligible structure. — boundless

Recall the koan, 'first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.' 'First, there is a mountain' refers to before training, before initial awakening, the state of everyday acceptance of appearances. 'Then there is no mountain' refers to the state of realisation of inter-dependence/emptiness and the illusory nature of appearance. 'Then there is' refers to the mature state of recognising that indeed mountains are mountains, and rivers are rivers, but with a balanced understanding.

To me, it seems absurd to refer to matter as a "hypothetical substance", as if it's worth entertaining that it is unreal. Absurd, because it's unwarranted to believe matter to NOT be an actual substance. It seems a futile attempt to wipe our cognitive slate clean. — Relativist

Metaphysics is first philosophy, it starts from first principles. Descartes started his famous meditation on Cogito with exactly that 'wiping the slate clean'.

Go back to the passage I was alluding to:

All that is objective, extended, active — that is to say, all that is material — is regarded by materialism as affording so solid a basis for its explanation, that a reduction of everything to this can leave nothing to be desired (especially if in ultimate analysis this reduction should resolve itself into action and reaction). But ...all this is given indirectly and in the highest degree determined, and is therefore merely a relatively present object, for it has passed through the machinery and manufactory of the brain, and has thus come under the forms of space, time and causality, by means of which it is first presented to us as extended in space and...active in time. — Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation

Now, if you consider any material object - the computer you're looking at now, the desk it's sitting on, the keyboard you're typing on: 'all this is given indirectly and in the highest degree determined, and is therefore merely a relatively present object, for it has passed through the machinery and manufactory of the brain, and has thus come under the forms of space, time and causality, by means of which it is first presented to us as extended in space and...active in time.'

You might explain the sense in which this is mistaken.

There's nothing empirical about metaphysical naturalism. You're conflating scientism with MN. — Relativist

You refer to 'facts of science' in defense of metaphysical naturalism, and specifically to reject anything perceived as inconsistent with modern science (teleology, qualia, formal and final causation, to mention a few.) You admit that physicalism doesn't really accomodate or explain the nature of mind. But then, when pressed about that, you say, that metaphysical naturalism is not science, even though it apparently relies on scientific ontology. Pardon me for so saying, but it seems a little disengenuous.

The indeterminism arises when interacting with something beyond the quantum system. This is where multiple interpretations of QM step in to explain what is occurring - and these explanations are essentially metaphysical, with the same problems that any metaphysical theory has: unverifiable and unfalsifiable. No interpretation is really inconsistent with MN, unless you choose to treat consciousness as something special and magical to begin with. — Relativist

Why the need for 'interpretations' at all? Why has the problem come up? You can't deny that debates over the meaning of quantum mechanics have been boiling ever since it was discovered. If there was a definitive explanation, then what were the arguments about, and why are they ongoing? Why was this thread created? Why does it ask 'does anyone support mind-independent reality'? Why did Einstein feel obliged to ask the question about the moon existing? You're not addressing any of those questions.

Plato sometimes referred to his Ideal realm as "more real" than material reality. His cave & shadow metaphor illustrated that concept. But I interpret his "eternal realities", not to mean more material & physical, but as more important for the theoretical purposes of philosophers. — Gnomon

As I’ve mentioned several times in this thread and elsewhere, this depends on the understanding that there are degrees of reality (or realness?) I suppose you could illustrate that with reference to a subject undergoing psychotic delusions - they would have ‘lost their grip in reality’, we would say. They would interpret their thoughts as demonic voices and perhaps suffer from hallucinations. Obviously the great majority of us are not delusional psychotics, but perhaps our grip on reality is still less that optimal, due to the way in which we habitually misinterpret or misunderstand the nature of existence. According to the Greeks, the philosopher has an enhanced understanding of the nature of being, superior to that of the ordinary uneducated man (the hoi polloi) because s/he is able to see more truly by virtue of the power of reason and mastery of the passions. So we’re in the middle, between rank psychosis at one end, and enlightened wisdom at the other. (And it’s a bell curve.)

The origin of Greek metaphysics is with Parmenides. In his prose-poem, Parmenides says that the great majority of people fall under the sway of illusory opinion, whereas he has been shown ‘the way of truth’ (by the goddess, as it happened, but then, this was the ancient world.) Parmenides’ successors, including Plato, sought to reconcile his vision with the facts of existence. This is the subject of an enormous body of arcane literature any fluency in which presumes knowledge of Ancient Greek (which could be expected in the days when students received an education in the Classics.)

Suffice to say, the idea of the forms in Plato are usually dismissed by current philosophy. But in my view, this is because they have been passed down through generations of classroom practices and their meaning has been lost or misinterpreted. This is why I keep referring to a fairly slim academic text book, Thinking Being: An Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition, by Eric Perl. It summarises Parmenides and Plato very effectively in the first couple of chapters. (It’s out of print but I’ve managed to get that .pdf copy.)

But in the examples you’ve given, I already see the kinds of mistakes that I think have crept in to the interpretations of Plato through centuries of interpretation. Chief amongst them is the idea that the ‘forms’ exist in some ‘ethereal realm’, a ‘Platonic heaven’ which is ‘separate’ from the ‘real world’, and also that ‘form’ can be understood as an ideal shape, which I think is completely mistaken. Perl explains the mistake of that in the chapter ‘The Meaning of Separation’ (see this post).

I’m not saying you or anyone should believe it, but that it’s important to recover the original vision of these texts as distinct from the many (often conflicting) interpretations that have grown up around them. Perl is a good starting point for that, as are books by Lloyd Gerson who is a recognised leading scholar of Platonist philosophy in the contemporary world.

It’s a temporary separation, ‘let’s live apart and work things out’. Early in the election cycle. They have no chance of any kind of electoral success as separate parties, if by some miracle the liberals come back from the dead they’d still need to form a coalition govt with the nationals to create a majority.

And yet, more often than not you appeal to empirical cognitive faculties — Jamal

‘Play something we can dance to!’ :rofl:

I’m not inclined towards any kind of philosophy that tries to treat mind (or consciousness) as something objective. Of course the functions of consciousness can be studied objectively through cognitive science, but its real nature is another matter. That’s why I’m not inclined to use expressions like ‘cosmic mind’ or the like. To me, the unknown nature of mind itself is very important to always recall (instead of believing that it has been or can be ‘explained’ by scientific principles.)

It always feels like you want to be a full-on metaphysical idealist but can't quite bring yourself to do it. — Jamal

Epistemic idealism - what we know is shaped by how we know. And empirical realist - not saying that the world is all in the mind. But that it has an ineliminably subjective pole, which we're not aware of unless we teach ourselves to be.

You haven't provided one, and indicated it's outside the scope of your interest — Relativist

I think I have provided one, but that you're not interested in it, or think that it's absurd, for calling into question what you think is obvious. Again, philosophy is 'love-wisdom', not an inventory of things that exist in the world, or methods of harnessing nature to our advantage. It is not necessarily in conflict with those activities, but it is also not defined in their terms. Plato thought that the principle task of the philosopher was to prepare themselves for their inevitable death. Has that been superseded by scientific progress? (I'm not referring here to such scientific fantasies as cryogenetics.)

Consider how absurd it would be to dismiss a well-supported scientific theory on the basis that it's inconsistent with some prior philosophical commitments (have you ever debated a creationist?) Again: what unequivocal facts are inconsistent with, and thus falsify, physicalism? Explanatory challenges are not defeaters, but they could be taken into account in the abductive reasoning. — Relativist

Physicalism is not a falsifiable hypothesis. It's a philosophical view of the nature of reality. The central problem with physicalism is, as Schopenhauer says, that it seeks to explain what is the most immediately apparent fact, namely, the fact of one's own conscious experience, in terms of a hypothetical substance namely matter, the real nature of which is conjectural and uncertain. As we've discussed, and you acnowledge, physicalism doesn't and probably cannot explain the nature of mind or consciousness, yet when we come to this point, that inconvenient fact is disregarded.

Do you truly not believe mind-independent objects? If so, why do you believe that? — Relativist

This is presented in the OP The Mind Created World, a précis of the first half being as follows.

That post defends a perspectival form of philosophical idealism, arguing that mind is foundational to reality—not in the sense that the world is “in” the mind, nor that mind is a kind of substance, but that any claim about reality is necessarily shaped by mental processes of judgment, perception, and understanding.

Contrary to the dominant assumptions of physicalism and metaphysical naturalism, which treat the physical world as ontologically basic and knowable through objective science, this essay argues that all knowledge of the world is always already structured by the perspective of a subject. This does not mean denying the empirical reality of a world independent of any particular mind, but rather recognizing that mind is the condition of the intelligibility of any objective claim.

I pose a thought experiment involving an alpine meadow to demonstrate that a scene without perspective is unintelligible and that, therefore, perspective is not incidental but constitutive of reality-as-known. Drawing on phenomenology and non-dualism, the argument is made that 'existence' and 'non-existence' are not a simple binaries, and that treating unperceived objects as straightforwardly existent (or non-existent) misconstrues the nature of experential knowledge.

The essay does not reject science or evolutionary accounts of the cosmos. Rather, it questions the default metaphysical assumption that objectivity is the sole criterion of reality. Instead, it contends that the world as known arises through the unifying activity of consciousness, which science has yet to fully explain and indeed generally tends to ignore.

Ultimately, the essay argues that philosophical (or transcendental) idealism, rightly understood, does not negate the reality of an external world, but sees it as inseparable from the conditions of its being known. What is called 'reality' is not merely physical, but always shaped by mind. So, therefore, mind is truly a fundamental constituent of what we understand as reality, but in a transcendental rather than objective sense.

Mind independence is true on an empirical level as a definite matter of fact. But the problem with methodological naturalism, is that it wishes to extend mind independence to reality as a whole, to make a metaphysic out of it. It tries to make a metaphysical principle out of empirical methodology. (Recommend Bas van Fraasen on this.)

That’s the sense in which I believe quantum theory undermines the assumption of scientific realism—an assumption that, I think, underwrites the metaphysical naturalism you’re defending.
— Wayfarer

It doesn't do that, in the least. — Relativist

Of course it does! As you've mentioned John Bell, another quote of his:

The discomfort that I feel is associated with the fact that the observed perfect quantum correlations seem to demand something like the "genetic" hypothesis. For me, it is so reasonable to assume that the photons in those experiments carry with them programs, which have been correlated in advance, telling them how to behave. This is so rational that I think that when Einstein saw that, and the others refused to see it, he was the rational man. The other people, although history has justified them, were burying their heads in the sand. I feel that Einstein's intellectual superiority over Bohr, in this instance, was enormous; a vast gulf between the man who saw clearly what was needed, and the obscurantist. So for me, it is a pity that Einstein's idea doesn't work. The reasonable thing just doesn't work. — John Bell, quoted in Quantum Profiles, by Jeremy Bernstein (Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 84)

Those 'correlations' were the subject of the 2022 Nobel Prize, awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger, which underscored a pivotal shift in our understanding of reality. Their experiments with entangled photons violated Bell inequalities, challenging the classical notions of local realism, the idea that objects possess definite properties independent of observation and that no influence can travel faster than light (source).

As noted in the Nobel Committee's award statement, their findings suggest that "quantum mechanics cannot be replaced by any local hidden-variable theory," implying that the properties of particles are not predetermined but are defined only upon measurement.

So, question: doesn’t the idea that particles lack definite properties prior to observation strike at the very core of ‘mind-independence’? And wasn't this one of the reasons why Albert Einstein (and now Roger Penrose) are highly critical of quantum theory, saying it must be incomplete or incorrect? And yet these very awards affirm the success of a theory that defies classical assumptions about the mind-independent nature of reality.

This exclusion could not be sustained in quantum physics, where the so-called observer problem brought the role of measurement and observation back into focus. Since then, physics has no longer provided the idealized model of mind-independent reality
— Wayfarer

That's simply not true. That was a claim some made, based on a basic Copenhagen interpretation. Most today would say that an observation is just one example of an entanglement, and that the entanglement results in a collapse of the wave function (some claim there's no collapse at all, but a world branching - but that's too unparsimonious for me). — Relativist

Actually I do have to circle back to this. The point at issue was the supposed mind-independence of the objects of classical physics. That is made explicit in Galileo's philosophy of science by the division of the 'primary attributes' (measurable) and 'secondary attributes (sensory).

Furthermore that the laws of physics were understood to be universal and not dependent on the context in which they were applied, operating deterministically in accordance with the mathematical principles discovered by Galileo and Newton (et al).

But with the discoveries of quantum physics, it was found that the experimental context had to be taken into account, because it has a direct bearing on outcome of the observation. One example is the wave-particle duality identified by Neils Bohr, which he called the 'principle of complementarity' and regarded as his most important philosophical discovery.

As for the 'measurement problem', that has never really been resolved to unanimous agreement. The reason for the so-called many worlds theory is precisely because it does away with the so-called 'wave function collapse' - but at the cost of infinitely proliferating worlds.

My interpretation of all this is that the 'modern period' corresponds with the period between the publication of Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687) and theFifth Solvay Conference (1927) when the main tenets of quantum mechanics were first made public. The modern period corresponds with the heyday of strong scientific realism. I'm of the view that the Solvay Conference marks the beginning of the post-modern period which appeared to undermine the mind-independent nature of reality (and in a much wider sense than in physics alone). This development was why Einstein felt obliged to ask the rhetorical question, 'Does the moon continue to exist when nobody is looking?' His answer to that question would be an emphatic 'yes'. But the point was, he had to ask! And subsequent science has not been kind to Einstein's scientific realist convictions.

That’s the sense in which I believe quantum theory undermines the assumption of scientific realism—an assumption that, I think, underwrites the metaphysical naturalism you’re defending.

Spinoza can be read as thinking that material substance has the potential for both the attributes of extension and cogitation. — Janus

Spinoza never used the term ‘material substance’. — Wayfarer

What did I miss?

I don’t know, the term ‘samadhi junkie’ suggests that practitioners may develop a strong personal predilection for the experience. — praxis

Hardly representative. Attachment to any experience is discouraged in Buddhist training. Samma samadhi is the guiding principle.

Nobody has brought up William James The Will to Believe. It's rather a modern classic in this context.